


a terrible couch

by asokatanos (Emryslin)



Series: object permanence [1]
Category: The Mentalist
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:14:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24481111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emryslin/pseuds/asokatanos
Summary: He turns to look at her then, an expression on his face that she cannot parse. It looks strangely akin to wonderment.“I think I saved her life.”She frowns a little in confusion. “You saved Grace?”
Relationships: Patrick Jane/Teresa Lisbon
Series: object permanence [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1768321
Comments: 9
Kudos: 45





	a terrible couch

It was a week into their redefining their world, and three days back from their hop skip and jump back from Miami. Between TSA’s ire with Jane, the Blue Bird Inn’s frustration at his dropping a crime scene on them during tourist season, and Abbott’s indulgent two week “suspension”, they’d elected to leave Miami International but avoid planes.

Jane being Jane and having reacquired some of the zest he’d seemed to have lost in recent months, had decided that their trip would be _interesting_ rather than the exhausting 20 hour drive Lisbon had expected. How he’d managed to finagle a hot air balloon partway across the Gulf of Mexico was beyond her, but Lisbon had found herself caught up in his infectious enthusiasm (none too dulled by his swollen ankle) and hadn’t asked too many questions. 

They’d been back in Austin three days, and after spending one exhausted but happy day in the Airstream recovering from the journey, Jane had charmed Lisbon’s landlord into shredding the paperwork Lisbon had submitted towards ending her lease at month’s end. The apartment thusly hers again, Lisbon had gratefully wandered in and turned the air conditioning to high before sitting there on the nearly empty floor in front of it and called the storage and shipping companies to get her belongings back. Luckily she had thought to put a hold on shipping when Abbott had held her transfer pending closure of the case, so her things had never left Austin. That still left the matter of unpacking, but it only took half a glance at Jane to know he’d help and probably find a way to transform the apartment into something brand new to create memories in. 

They’d spent most of the third day moving furniture back in, and Jane took the opportunity to tease her about her terrible taste in couches. The smile on his face was back in full force, as if it hadn’t all but disappeared since he’d come back from the island, as if it hadn’t been only its ghost that had been making appearances by rote. The resulting flare of guilt had prompted Lisbon to set down a box and reach to kiss him, glad to be able to issue this interim apology until she fully processed everything that had transpired since they’d both first set foot in Austin and the role she had played in it. 

“If I remember right, this wasn’t quite your reaction the last time I told you you had a terrible couch,” he’d drawled, dopey eyes marring the rakish grin he’d been attempting. “Maybe I should do so more often.”

“Hush!” She’d told him, accenting the word with a nudge to his ribs. But her smile too gave her away, and she regretted that she could have put this precious friendship at risk by leaving. 

Later that evening she wakes, shivering slightly, and it takes her a moment to realize that she hadn’t adjusted the thermostat before they’d sprawled into bed. It takes her another moment to realize Jane isn’t in the room, though she’s unsurprised when she hears him softly putting books on a shelf in the other room, making use of his insomnia. She listens to him contentedly for a while, a glance at her phone telling her it isn’t late enough at night to worry that he’ll be sleep deprived. Eventually though, the sounds stop, and she briefly wonders if he’s fallen asleep in the living room when she hears what sounds like a gasp. 

Startled, she slips off the bed and silently makes her way out of the room, instincts alert. She finds him sat near the window in the wan light of the moon, holding a photograph in a frame he’d fished out of the box at his side. She hears the gasping noise again, and moves fully into the room, not bothering to turn on the light. He turns to her then, and she’s horrorstruck to find his face awash with tears, expression inscrutable. In all her years at his side, and in all the tragedies that have befallen him, she has never seen him really _cry_. 

She rushes to his side, the sound of his name muffled when she pulls him to her, not understanding what has happened. She has the wild thought that he regrets their newfound closeness and wants to leave, but then her eyes alight on the frame still clutched in his hands, and she falters.

It’s a photo of their old team, taken years ago during a holiday party at the CBI. They’re all still in their work clothes, and Jane grins cheerily at the camera, having just set a pair of festive antlers on Cho’s head from behind. Lisbon herself stands in front of Jane and slightly to his right, and Rigsby grins next to her, hunching slightly to stay in frame. Grace is on Cho’s left, and is looking slightly away from the camera, caught in a moment of amusement as she turns to look. The picture is old enough that there is still something slightly fractured in the young agent’s expression - it hadn’t been long since she had shot O’Laughlin. But Lisbon loves this photograph - she’s kept it because she knows that it’s evidence of Jane’s love for the team. He stands behind them all, a separate entity on his own, but has still escaped his self imposed barriers to cheer van Pelt.

She has no idea why it’s brought him to tears, so she releases him from the vicelike grip she’d had him in, and sits next to him on the floor before looping one arm through his and reaching up with her other hand to wipe at his face.

“Jane,” she ventures softly, “what’s wrong? What’s got you so upset?”

“‘M not upset,” he mumbles, but his shoulders are still shuddering, so she gives him a moment, leaning a little into him in silent support. Eventually, he heaves a breath, and his arm tightens around hers.

“I... after the first few months on the island,” he begins, “I avoided thinking about him.” 

She doesn’t need to ask which _him_ he means. They’ve largely avoided talking about the past altogether, finding it easier to maintain wool over their eyes and stay in the present where the nightmares are far less monstrous. 

“I knew I needed to process it. To, to really believe that it was all over, but after ten years - and four months on the beach - I didn’t want to give him any more. But he took my family, and then he took ten years, and then he took the CBI, and because I was so far away it was like... in some ways it was like he took you too. All I had left there were the clothes I’d arrived in and the cash I’d managed to hide. Four months in the heat and the sun and the sand damaged the clothes and eventually the money started to run out too. He was taking from me even after, after I killed him. So I just stopped. It was easier to just stop than to process. And once I did, I made nice with Franklin and Alfredo and figured out how I could get letters to you.”

He trails off, looking blankly out the window at nothing, before turning his attention back to the picture in his hands.

“Maybe it was the right thing at the time, but looking at this picture, I remembered.” He shifts the frame in his hands, and to her surprise, his fingertips come to rest softly on van Pelt’s smiling face. He turns to look at her then, an expression on his face that she cannot parse. It looks strangely akin to wonderment. 

“I think I saved her life.”

She frowns a little in confusion. “You saved Grace?”

He nods, his attention shifting back to the photo. “You remember... it was one of the first times she got to go into the field, she was so happy. That was the case we met McAllister. She was bait for the Boatwrights, but McAllister stopped her on the road and wouldn’t let her leave. I was so caught up with being right - and impressing you - and then you had to rescue me from the killers. I didn’t give McAllister a second thought until Lorelei’s slip, and even then, I never thought about how insistent he had been with Grace.

“Later, when he wanted to get someone close to our team, he could have gotten to anyone. After Rigs and van Pelt broke up, Rigsby was more vulnerable - it would have been easier and smarter to get to him. He needed someone to pick up his pieces more than van Pelt did at the time. But Red John still sent O’Laughlin after her. O’Laughlin was FBI, a prime asset, and nobody picked up on him, not even me. But that’s just it,” he pauses and looks back at her, and she is perplexed when she sees calm in his face instead of the guilt he usually wears when thinking about something he’d missed.

“Mostly when Red John played games, it was about me. But what’s the point of playing a game if your opponent doesn’t know you’re playing it? I never realized O’Laughlin was Red John’s man, but he never really had anything to do with me, and because van Pelt seemed happy, I paid him no attention. She and I were friends, but we didn’t spend much time together, which meant that O’Laughlin was never in a good position to watch me.” He stops and takes a deep breath before continuing.

“I think he was there to prime her. I think she was eventually going to be a Red John victim.”

Lisbon gasps, trying not to imagine her dear friend as a crime scene photo. If Jane is right, McAllister had had an eye on van Pelt for years after meeting her. An obsession only secondary to his obsession with Patrick Jane. If Jane is right, van Pelt had been in danger of becoming the worst of Red John’s victims. Suddenly, she understands what Jane is trying to tell her.

“If you’re right, then when you finally ended things, you might have saved van Pelt from- from something truly terrible,” she concludes for him, and he nods. 

“When all this first started, when I spoke out about Red John, I got my family killed." He ignores the sound of protest she makes, and continues. "Eventually you and the team became family even though I didn’t deserve it. But maybe... maybe when I killed him, it wasn’t just accomplishing what I had promised to do. Maybe I _saved_ some family too.” The tears on his face haven't fully dried, but he is smiling tremulously at her.

She untangles herself from him and stands, immediately reaching down to pull him up so she can more easily wrap her arms around him. She’s known since the moment she met him that he unfairly bears guilt about him, disguising it with bright smiles meant to distract like magicians’ tricks. She doesn’t know if his theory is true, and there will never be a way to know for sure. But more than anything, he deserves peace, and she’s fiercely glad if this revelation has finally brought a small measure of it to him.

Distantly, she wishes that they had talked as soon as she’d decided to move to Austin. She’d still been rankling about having been moved about like a chess piece, all too aware that other agents whispered about the fact that she hadn’t ever set foot in Quantico and wondered none too quietly about her credentials and that she was only there at Patrick Jane’s insistence. So she’d pushed Jane away to make it known that she was her own entity, and had kept pushing him while Marcus Pike had entered her life. She’d been too busy pushing to notice that in agreeing to move to DC for a job arranged by Pike, she was leaping into a situation completely identical except for the fact that it would lack the best friend she’d ever had. But like Red John, that was in the past, and they hadn’t talked about it.

Eventually, they’ll have to, she knows. They both have a lot to apologize for; it will take time for her to believe he will never leave again, and for him to believe she’s choosing him for good. But for now, they hold onto one another with the light from the moon striping through the blinds onto her terrible couch and boxes of her belongings surrounding them, Jane’s bubble of peace cocooning them both from everything else. 

Later, when she convinces him to go back to bed, he manages to sleep for twelve hours straight. 

**Author's Note:**

> I was suddenly struck the other day by the idea that RJ had been after Grace wholly separate to his cat and mouse game with Jane. Since she's never attacked, she never knows, but I liked the idea of Jane figuring it out and finding some peace in having accidentally thwarted it. Initially I'd wanted it to happen after they meet again either after the Haibach debacle or after White Orchids, but this felt more right. Self-hating Jane makes me very sad so this is introspective Lisbon while still being Jane centric.


End file.
